The Lives of the Living
by Mystic25
Summary: An AU of moments about the last battle in DH 2, where Harry was brought back from the Forbidden Forest. Spoilers from the movie.


"The Lives of the Living."

Mystic25

Summary: An AU of moments about the last battle in DH 2, where Harry was brought back from the Forbidden Forest. Spoilers from the movie.

Rating: T for violence and imagery.

A/N #1: I saw, DH2 on my new DVD, this is what happened.

A/N #2: This doesn't follow the exact scenes, I added to it, nor does it follow the pairings, not exactly, you have been forewarned.

**xxxxxXxxxx**

"_Peace is not only more important than war, but infinitely more arduous."_

-George Bernard Shaw

"_Where there is love__,__ there is life_."

-Mohandas Gandhi

**xxxxxxXxxxxxx**

Her heart beat fluttered oddly.

Her feet were heavy on the crumbling stone steps, Ron moving beside her as fast as her heartbeats. The horizon smoked. It smelled of blood and dirt, and rot, all things dying.

She heard Ginny talking to Neville," _Neville, who is that? Who's Hagrid carrying?"_

There was a swarm of Death Eaters walking towards the broken castle like Carrion crows. She felt Ron beside her, as she walked with the others, meeting their common enemies on the forefront of the battle ground.

The swarm moved slowly, almost regally, as if savoring something. In front was Voldemort, pale and ghostlike, flaps of his robe battering against him, wafting a putrid stink over the air.

Hagrid was there, towering over him by _yards_. Yet the half giant game keeper was weeping into his massively tangled beard, holding on to something.

Hermione walked a little faster down the steps, trying to see what it was.

Voldemort stopped, the others behind him stopped a few paces. He surveyed them all like they were nothing more than mangy rats crawling out to escape a fire. He was _smiling_, and it was a sickening thing to look at. Because something so _evil_ shouldn't be happy. It meant something was wrong, something _bad-_

Hagrid had stopped walking, and stood, clutching his bundle to him like it was beloved broken toy trampled upon.

"Harry Potter, is _dead!"_

Hermione's heartbeats stopped. Her brain traveled like a runner, suddenly trying to process an overload from four words-

Then she heard Ginny scream "_No _No!" She heard her tear forward, saw the other girl trying to yank herself forward from Neville's grasp who tried to pull her back.

"_Foolish girl!"_ Voldemort's taunted and mocked as Ginny kept screaming.

She heard herself begein screaming too, it was in her head. The screaming and the gasp had tried to force its way out of her throat at the same time, and they canceled each other out, but she could still _hear _it in her head, it was loud and deafening.

She finally saw what Ginny saw, what _all_ of them saw.

The thing in Hagrid's arms, one arm hanging completely limp, covered in dirt, eyes closed.

"Lie him at my feet!" Voldemort commanded into the air, watching with the same sick happiness as before as he orders were carried out. The still form laid down so gently by the Game Keeper with the huge hands who openly weeping, broken.

Hagrid was yanked back roughly by one of the Death Eaters in the mass.

Voldemort leered. With one death white sinewy foot, he slid the face of the unmoving boy towards the crowd.

The face was filthy, the glasses hanging off, dark hair matted with blood, so much blood.

Hermione had _heard_ Voldemort say it, but it slammed into her then, like a boulder smashing into her chest, her heartbeat started again – it doubled, tripled, then it was gone, exploded.

Harry.

It was Harry.

No-

"_Harry Potter is dead!"_ the gleeful voice echoed the phrase again around the silent bewildered crowd. A jeering of support arose from the Death Eaters and Snatchers, the carrion crow murder cawing their victory.

"_The Boy Who Lived is no longer anything but an broken irony!"_ Voldemort spun round and round the brokenness of students and teachers as they all started with horrified eyes, of a shock thrown on them en mass. _"The natural order has been restored! This is MY domain!"_

"He fought you off!" Neville's shout was so loud his body pitched forward from the force of it, his chest was heaving. "He _beat_ you!" He stared at the broken thing that was Harry Potter, his friend, and he was _angry_ so very angry. "People die all the time, friends, family-" The crowd behind him, was shocked, in disbelief. The whispered rumors of Harry Potter dying at the hands of Voldemort were just that _rumors _They weren't _supposed _to happen, he wasn't' supposed to _die._

"We lost Harry tonight," it hurt so much for Neville to say, it started to seep into the crowd, when he said that, leach into all of them that he wasn't coming back. "But he's still with us, in here." He pointed to his heart, to a place Voldemort couldn't understand because he had none, he could never understand loss this great, love this fierce.

"Harry?" The ripple had reached her. Hermione's voice was so shattered that it could only whisper. Even with Voldemort, screeching terrifying things of reigning over them in blood and fire the rest of their lives, she could only see one thing.

He was unmoving, he might have been asleep. She had seen him sleeping so many times, he would be curled on his side, just like that. She tried, for one insane moment, to believe that this was true, like a little girl wishing away a monster under the bed. But his chest remained still, not rising _once_.

"_NOO_!" Her scream was finally born, and while Ginny's was piercing, hers was _shattered,_ it echoed, it resonated. It turned Ginny, Ron, the murderous crowd of Death Eaters and Snatchers, _all_ of them to her, and away from their own grief, because it was a sound of pure agony.

She scrambled forward like Ginny, sliding over rocks, and people, until she was at the front of the crowd.

Until she was at the feet of Voldemort, throwing herself down to her knees, to the boy lying so still there.

She had moved so fast, without any interruption, nothing grabbed her, or fought her off. But her brain processed none of that.

His hair was a mess of blood from where he had fallen onto rocks and tree branches .His face was so pale, he felt cold, like the Forbidden Forest on the Winters night, lonely and gone. "Harry _Harry!" _She shook him, like he _was _merely asleep, like he would wake up.

From the depths of his closed eyes Harry felt that shake, It shook his teeth, it almost jolted a treacherous breath out of him. It was Hermione shaking with her whole life.

"_Harry!"_ Hermione tried again, grabbing the collar of his tattered jacket in both her hands, seizing his body up and down, like he would respond to her. He didn't.

Voldemort sneered, low and sadistic, _enjoying_ scene underneath him. He observed with amusement, flicking his eyes over the pair of them, the dead boy and the screaming girl. "You're a bit too late girl," He tsked like he was watching a mangy dog he had allowed to lope into his presence, allowing it to amuse him before he killed it.

Not even Voldemort's sneers were enough to rattle Hermione from believing that Harry would wake up, like he had overslept. She was in a delusion, somewhere between disbelief and reality, somewhere foggy, where she wanted to _stay. _Because if the fog cleared up, if she started to see things sharply-

He looked like that time she had seen him come back from his Quidditch Match, the one where he broke his arm, and lost all his bones to a spell gone bad. Except he was so _cold_, and his eyes completely and – and –

The fog cleared, it cleared like a storm wind had blown into it, it felt like someone had taken her heart and ripped it still beating from her chest. It was why she had been allowed to cross the boundary to the Death Eaters unharmed. It was what Voldenmort had been _waiting _for.

"No-"

Voldemort smiling was _terrifying_. He was relishing in the pain of those who knew Harry Potter, of Mudblood filth who was clawing at a corpse."Yes girl, do you feel it? Do you feel how there is _nothing_?"

Hermione could only shake her head in disbelief, not at Voldemort, not at the pure raw _evil_ standing so close to her she could hear him breathing.

She was shaking her head because of what she _couldn't _hear breathing.

"No- no, _no!" _Her voice rattled tormented and lost and gone, something inside her began to bleed, and to hurt. Harry can't be, he _wasn't-_

Tears burned her eyes, she couldn't count them, she couldn't stop them from falling. She touched his face, she _felt_ him under her hands, but he wasn't moving.

"No!" the last repetition of this word was a gasp, a choking, a breaking. She pulled him up to her, holding to him hearing the amused sickening laughter of the Death Eaters as she curled herself into his body.

Those at Hogawarts had all know Harry Potter in their own right, had befriended him, had cared for him. But one of his closest, dearest and most loved friends huddled on the ground, holding to him, to his broken body - The crowd of students were half gone from war, from the pain of losing _everything_. But, they broke even more at that moment. Even Ginny, yes even Ginny Weasely, broke into pieces at such a sight.

_Harry, no no please, please! Please!_

_I'm sorry, Harry I'm so sorry- _

Hermione thought she _thought_ this, but it was a tortured half delirious whisper, burred into his forehead raining tears on his eyes. Harry heard all of it, eyes closed, breathing in the tiniest of shallow movements, heart flailing wildly against his ribs. But Hermione was too far gone, to ripped apart to hear such a noise.

And Harry could do _nothing_.

He was seeing his own death, through the eyes of those who would _truly experience_ it, the ones he left behind. And it didn't make him grateful for having someone who loved him enough to mourn him. It ripped him apart too.

He didn't _want_ to be mourned, he wanted to be _alive_, he wanted to see the world. Dumbledore had given him a _choice, _but one he couldn't take the first option. The cleanliness of King's Cross Station _wasn't_ life.

_This_ was life. This broken, flawed, dirty, gritty, painful _beautiful_ thing. It was why he had come back. Why he had stood there in the Forbidden Forest and let Voldemort hit him with a curse without any deflection. Why he stood here holding his breath, feeling her holding him, her body rocking with convulsive shudders.

She was so close to him, but he couldn't move. He wanted to touch her, he wanted to touch her so badly, tell her it was okay, but he couldn't. He could only lie there as one of his best and dearest friends crumbled around him.

Hermione hugged him to her, crying into the eyes that would now no longer open. His eyes were green, they were green, and she would never see them again. Something so simple that hurt so very, very much.

"I should've gone with you-"

He was dead.

Her Harry.

He had died all alone, to save them.

There was nothing _noble_ about it, it was so very heartbreaking.

Her heart and the hundreds of other hearts that had met a boy so long ago who never asked for a life of war, who only wanted what they all did, laughter, and love, and friendship.

Voldemort watched as she held him. "A bit late aren't we my dear?" His smile was low and slow and slithering, laughter echoed behind him, mournful silence echoed in front of him. "Perhaps if you give your true love a kiss, maybe he'll wake?"

A demented laugher sprang from a flattened snake like face. An echo of sick laughter flew behind him.

Hermione's chest was choking on tears, she felt the _wrongness_ of the stare. But she did what he said anyway. "I love you," A kiss to cracked, bleeding lips, a waterfall of tears hitting her dear, dear friend. "Harry, I love you-" It was a lifetime of memoires, of things in those three words, memories she would never have, she was trying to _give_ them all to him, all at once.

From behind closed eyelids, deep where he was holding his breath, Harry heard his mother's voice low and sweet, from the Pensive, talking to him as a baby, to tell him things in mere seconds that she wanted a lifetime to say:

_Harry, be safe, Harry, be strong. Mama loves you, Dada loves you._

He loved them, his mother, his father, he loved them _all. _But they knew it, they had gone with him, they had stood beside him.

He had to answer the one who couldn't, who he had been forced to leave behind, even as she begged to come.

_I love you too Hermione, I love you so much. It's okay, it will all be okay. _

"Enough of this!" Voldemort grabbed Hermione's arm and pulled her up, flinging her backwards. He had never taken to kindly to the words '_love'_. Love was a disease, it rotted, it was useless. "String him up, I want his carcass flapping in the wind for all to bear witness to the _Great_ Harry Potter's demise!"

"No!" Hermione fought when she saw the Death Eaters approaching Harry's body, Belatrix Lestrange in the lead, a repulsive smile on her face. Neville had taken hold of her arm, but she was still screaming, she couldn't let them get to Harry. He had already suffered enough, a lifetime of enoughs, he had died broken, and lonely, at 17-years-old, with no one living beside him when the pain blinded him to his end.

Harry felt himself being yanked up to his feet, his head flopping boneless on his neck, sneakers scraping the concrete like a marionette puppet with drooping strings. Rough, filthy huge hands were holding to his arms, his glasses crashed to the stone.

"No!" Her screams were met with laughter, cackling and amused.

"His Whore is not amused My Lord," the Snatcher, the one who wanted to rape her repeatedly in the Forest before taking her to Malfoy Manner grinned at her lazily, like he was about to try again. He stepped from the single mass, turning back into one again, his fitly tangle of hair blowing behind him.

"Perhaps the l'il lady would like a token," He pulled out a rusted four bowie knife, so fast it squelched a nose. He wrenched Harry's neck upwards, tracing the pale skin of Harry's neck. "Something for the memory box ay?" He slid the knife up behind Harry's left hear, pressing his knife firm. "Right or left beautiful?"

"Don't touch him!" Hermione screamed, screamed with the part of it that was left of her. Harry was dead, he was _dead._ It was so very painful, it was so very broken. But he was still _hers_, dead or not, she wasn't going to let them hurt him anymore.

Something warm, and thick, and coppery dripped down his left ear, it burned. Harry wrenched forward, he rolled, the Snatcher startled, and dropped his knife. He hit the ground in a tumble. He came up and shot a spell at Voldmort, then two, then three, breaking rocks and stones, Voldemort countering for every step, his shock never showing, even as his followers _did._

There were audible gasps from the students, from the teachers, from friends.

Noises happened, fights began to break out, it was as if a jolt of electricity had been given to the crowd. The students screamed because Harry had been _resurrected, _their grief fell away to fighting, this broken mass of students and teachers, began to fight again, because Harry had never _stopped_ fighting. He _was_ still with them, he had never left.

Nagaini coiled from beside Voldemort, and lunged, all 20 feet of her hurling at him with a stance that was meant to kill.

"Harry!" Something fought beside him and _into_ him, firing a hex at the snake, sending her back, reeling, spitting, hissing. He grabbed to a mass of blonde tangled hair and warmth that smelled like blood and vanilla, kissing hot exposed breath. There was no thinking about labels, or where they came from, there was only death, and now, the moment they found themselves in.

She pulled away so fast it shook her, crouching low behind the rock they had slid behind. An earsplitting noise, and a rain of pebbles fell on her and him.

"Find Ron!" Harry shouted above all the noise. A scream came from somewhere far off, a little girl's scream, a blonde first year dying by a giant's cudgel. An older scream, Semeus Finnigan, falling from a Centuar's arrow piercing his leg. Everything was dying around Harry, the smoke misted his eyes. He held tight to Hermione's beating pulse on her wrist. It had to end.

Hermione was scared to leave him again, like he would fade away and dissolve, a rock exploded again above her, Harry's arm shot over her to shield her from the resulting pebbled rain. "Find Ron, get the snake and kill it!"

His hand was so warm and _tight _and _alive_ on hers. He hadn't died, he had come back. She couldn't do this.

"_Go!"_

A werewolf lunged into their rock, a 12-year-old boy screamed, as the thing bit into its neck, and then he stopped screaming, deathly still, his blood dripping around them like a river.

He roamed his eyes over hers. He couldn't do this either. He couldn't lose her again. They were all dying around him, all dying _for_ him.

He couldn't lose any one else.

"I know." He told her a lifetime of things in two words. He didn't kiss her, he grabbed a hold of her jacket collar, shaking it, feeling the beating thing underneath it. "_GO!"_

She breathed like she was choking, but she left him there, taking herself into the fight, hearing the screams of dying friends, seeing their home burning before their eyes. Wanting to end a war that should have never happened at all.

Harry watched her go, she had found Ron, battered and bloody but _alive, _wands up into the, fighting among the screaming.

Dumbledore was wise, and strong, but he was wrong.

Harry didn't pity the living. He _loved_ the living. Their heartbeats, their blood, their _life_, it was all so short, so quick, that when it was threatened they would fight until there was nothing left, because it was _theirs._

Harry jumped up from behind his rock and threw himself into the fighting and the dying, to save the living.

**xxxxxxXxxxxx**

_**Epilogue**_

It hadn't been 19 years, or even ten years. It was one year, almost one year. And she was with him. Standing beside a broken castle wall. Ron beside her, watching as reconstruction was still underway, the wall only half as high as it was. The smoke still lingering, the dried blood scent, the cries of ghosts still in the air. The Castle had lost most of it's West Tower, the school would was reopened, but, she was injured.

She shielded her eyes with her hands, watching the construction, the rebuilding. She peaked way over the spot where the Elder Wand had vanished, where Harry had thrown it at the end of the battle.

"Hermione, watch it!" Ron snatched her back from the cracking wall. "Are you mental?"

"Ron, I wasn't going to fall!" she snapped, scarf flowing in the wind, thick denim jacket wrapped securely around her to ward off the cold.

"You're a bit top heavy at the moment to be talkin' Hermione," Ron admonished, letting go of her arm. Hermione huffed in indignation, and wrapped her coat around herself, and a stomach that had grown hugely in such a short time.

"You're a prat Ron Weasley!" she snapped.

"That may be," Ron admonished. He pointed to her swollen stomach. "But that's my niece in there, and she's a bit young for falling off of walls."

Ron had been broken when Hermione had admitted that she had been pregnant, not even a week after the war, and not by him. Green eyes behind glasses, stood beside her, looking like he was about to be kicked or punched by his best mate for what they had done.

It had hurt him, Ron hadn't spoken to them for _weeks_ afterwards. But his anger had run it's course, as anger does, leaving him exhausted and spent at its bottom, with two choices. Hate them or not hate them.

Slowly, he had come back, come back home to his friends, there had been enough _hate_ done last year to end them all, he wasn't about to add to it. He wanted to build something _more._

Hermione rolled her eyes at him. She pulled back from the broken wall, but still examined the horizon. Fifty feet below, down on the planes of the forest was a grave site. Nothing official, not yet, it was too soon, deadlines and deals and speeches were still being written and struck.

It was nothing but a patch of dirt, with mounds where grass had finally started to grow, and squirrels and birds were just now starting to come back to. It was a sad, haunted place, with lonely ghosts, but brave ones, they had a lot of friends buried down there. George and Ron and Ginny had buried their brother down there. Remus and Tonks shared one grave, Harry had let Teddy plant flowers on it, he was too young to understand it, but he seemed to gravitate towards that one mound, like he could hear the whispering of the spirits that were his parents, loving him, missing him.

"Ginny wants to see you," Ron said to the pair of them. "Mum's having a big dinner before she's off to University. She figures you'll bring her a _mate_, Mate." Ron laughed this part to Harry. There had been months of bitterness between Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley. Not anger, only sadness, when the realized, through the dinners, the handholds, it wasn't going to work, they weren't the same people they had been before the War.

Harry laughed at this as well. "I'm a bit short on _mates_ at the moment," his eyes were on the grave when he said this.

Ron turned back to look as well, heaving a sigh. Sometime at night he would hear George come back into the burrow, and sneak up to the attic that he had shared with Fred. Ron had found him up there one night, with a bottle of Fire Whiskey, clutching a Weasley Whisbee Rocket to his chest, whispering.

"This was a _great_ one Freddie, remember how long we worked on this?" whispering, this hunched over on his knees, drinking, and crying, lonely for something. "Remember it Freddie, Remember?"

Ron sat with him that night too, and both brothers had gotten drunk over Fire Whiskey, remembering a brother who had gone, feeling him all over the attic still.

Harry turned to watch the grave as well, remembering, still hearing all those who had fallen, hearing their screams, but also their laughter, the sounds of them roaming the halls, asking for quills, asking for food. _Living._

He hadn't saved _nearly_ enough of them, there were too many _mounds _out there. He had only done his best, and on days, like today, it hurt, because it didn't seem like enough.

A hand slid warm into his, he grasped the fingers instinctively. There was no ring on that hand, they were too young to be married. They were too young for this baby, but she had been borne of a lonely night in the week after the battle, when they were so _raw_ and tired, they didn't hold back. But, she was a product of something so deep, so _wonderous_, in that bleak moment, that they couldn't give her up.

If they were honest, it was what broke Harry and Ginny up.

But if they were _really_ honest, it hadn't because Ginny had broken up with Harry that night when he was carried out of the Forbidden Forest. Because Ginny loved him, but she couldn't love him as much as she saw Hermione loving him when she thought he was gone.

She had let him go then, because she wanted him to be happy, he deserved so much happiness, she could at least give him _something_. With a last sweet kiss, Ginny had parted with him, telling him only to remember her.

Harry squeezed Hermione's hand, felt her chin rest into that spot on his shoulder where a groove had formed into his shoulder blade.

"I know." she kissed his shoulder, and rested her head up back again with a sigh, blowing it in his ear. The baby kicked her so hard and sharp, she knew he had to have felt it.

And when he squeezed her hand tighter, she knew he did.

Ron stepped closer to her, and she reached out her free hand, and he took it. Holding to it.

And they stood there, for what seemed like hours, watching their city being rebuilt.

**xxxxxxXxxxxx**

End.

Wow, okay I just made myself cry.

This was just supposed to be about Hermione seeing Harry being carried back into the castle, but well, it's became _this. _

There will be no sequel, it would take from it, not add to it.

R/R please.

Peace,

Mystic.


End file.
